Effective Schools

In July 1966, University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman finished
Equality of Educational Opportunity, which asserted that schools were
generally ineffective in breaking the poverty cycle. The "Coleman
Report,'' as it came to be known, gave rise to the widespread notion--a
misinterpretation, according to Coleman--that schools cannot make much
difference in the lives of poor children. In some measure, the Coleman
Report spawned the effective schools movement, by provoking a number of
research studies to determine whether this notion was true or
false.

The late Ron Edmonds, Harvard professor and the father of the
effective schools movement in the United States, defined the
characteristics of the effective school and put them into practice in a
number of poor schools in New York City. Today, thousands of
schools--in 42 percent of the nation's districts, according to one
recent estimate--are basing their programs and procedures on effective
schools research.

The overriding principles of the effective schools movement are that
all children can learn, that schools can be effective, and that schools
must be held accountable for becoming effective and providing "learning
for all.''

Among other things, the following characterize effective
schools:

A safe and orderly environment.

High expectations for student success.

A principal who provides instructional leadership and
communicates the mission of the school to staff, students, and
parents.

A clear and focused mission.

The opportunity to learn and a large amount of student time on
task.

Frequent monitoring of student progress.

Parental understanding of, and support for, the basic mission and
parental participation in the school.

The high point of the effective schools movement was in the first
half of the 1980s, when its ideas seemed mint fresh and the reform
stage was much less cluttered. But its leaders stress that the
movement's mission is alive and well and the job is by no means
finished.

The movement has entered what they call "the second generation,'' in
which the original principles have been broadened and adapted to
accommodate the changed circumstances of the 1990s.

Lawrence Lezotte, senior vice president of Effective Schools, for
example, says that the movement has expanded its efforts from
individual schools to include whole districts and even states and plans
to be a major voice in the school debates of the decade ahead.

He quotes Ron Edmonds, who said in the mid-1970s: "We can, whenever
and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling
is of interest to us. We already know more than we need to do this.
Whether we do it or not must finally depend on how we feel about the
fact that we have not done it so far.''

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